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THE DAILY ASTORIAN • FRIDAY, JUNE 24, 2016
HISTORIC
PHOTO OF THE WEEK
Columbia River Maritime Museum
A painting of the Leyland Brothers helped the South Street Seaport Museum in New York with a restoration project.
LEYLAND BROTHERS
By JEFFREY SMITH
Special to The Daily Astorian
A
n interesting request came to my atten-
tion from the director at the South
Street Seaport Museum in New York.
He had been told that we had a painting in
our collection of a ship called Leyland Broth-
ers that happened to have been a sister ship to
the Wavertree, a 19th century iron-hulled sail-
ing ship, one of their loating collection that
they were in the process of restoring. (We fea-
tured an article by Nancy Lloyd in a recent
issue of the Quarterdeck that mentioned the
Wavertree.)
South Street Seaport was interested
because our painting showed some detail of
the bulwarks (the area inside the hull above
?
9-1-WHAT?
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deck) that would help them to determine a
color scheme for their restoration efforts. The
Leyland Brothers and the Wavertree were fre-
quent visitors to the Columbia River back
around the early 1900s, hauling mostly grain
to ports across the Paciic.
My first thought was, “Oh boy, this is
going to be fun!” with a bit of trepidation.
In searching the vessel file I indeed found
a reference to the Leyland Brothers and
discovered we did in fact possess a paint-
ing of the subject. It turns out it was the
second item given to the museum back in
1962 by our founder Rolf Klep. I brought
the painting out of storage and photo-
graphed it, capturing the details of the bul-
warks. These images were sent off to South
Street Seaport and within an hour about a
half dozen people were requesting permis-
sion to access the images. The director and
other staff, shipyard foreman, preservation
experts, volunteers all wanted to see this
new information pertinent to their resto-
ration efforts on the Wavertree.
Capt. Jonathan Boulware, South Street
Seaport Museum’s executive director, sent an
email thanking us for the very helpful images.
We were glad (and a bit relieved) that we
could help.
In 1962, Klep gave the museum two paint-
ings of ships, initiating what has become one
of the inest collections of maritime material
on the West Coast. The two now hang proudly
in the executive director’s ofice.
Jeffrey Smith is curator at the Columbia
River Maritime Museum.
Soccer hooligans
S
o the North Coast might be football country and what not, but we have our
share of soccer fans, too.
You can never be too careful around soccer fans, as the emergency
caller in Seaside sensed on a Saturday night: “Caller reported a suspicious
man just sitting in his car. The man was watching a soccer match on his
phone.”
Follow reporter Kyle Spurr on his 9-1-What? Twitter watch, where a few of
the sometimes head-scratching calls to area dispatch take center stage. The full
feed is at www.twitter.com/9_1_WHAT.
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